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Wednesday, July 09, 2008

The 60th Carnival of Feminists

Welcome to the Carnival of Feminists! It is Wednesday morning in India, so I am putting up the carnival. I am still accepting entries till midnight, so send in your submissions (of your own or others’ posts) on the form here, or to unmanaATgmailDOTcom.

This is the first time to my knowledge that the carnival is being hosted from India, so I have included several posts by Indians and showcasing issues peculiar to India.

Feminism and Culture, with a Spotlight on Indian CultureApu writes about the dilemmas modern Indian parents face in raising liberal daughters. I can identify with this myself: my parents brought me up to be financially independent, yet didn’t seem to be able to completely reconcile themselves with the idea that I might be independent of them in other ways as well.

Indian Home Maker takes on an old Indian institution – the joint family – and argues that it is oppressive to women, especially young wives. The joint family is a patriarchal family structure, with the oldest male being the “head of the family”, and the newest daughter-in-law usually being the position with least power.

Reema talks about the undesirable child in India – the girl child. Sadly, in many families in India, the birth of a girl is greeted with disappointment, not joy, as a woman is supposed to be a burden on the family. I also had experiences similar to Reema’s, with my mother often being asked, “You have two daughters? No sons?” I also remember one woman who followed that up, after finding out how my sister and I were doing at college and school respectively, with, “Your daughters are so smart! You don’t need sons!”

Chandni also writes about women getting labeled on the basis of the clothes they wear. I am aware this happens in every society, but it is somewhat more complicated in India, where each region has its own traditional costume (which of course, it is the duty of the women to “preserve”), and you might get labeled for just tying your sari a different way, let alone for wearing a short skirt.

Whatsername claims that “marriage is beholden to the people undertaking it”, and I thoroughly agree with her view. It annoys me when people imagine my life must have changed in certain ways after marriage (for instance, a colleague sympathetically asking as I leave office late in the evening, “You’ll have to go home and cook now?”) It astonishes me when single acquaintances ask about my married life to get an idea of how life will change for them after marriage – this includes acquaintances who are engaged to be married (and they ask me instead of asking their partner?!). Why should you let anyone else make the rules for your life? Marriage is what the two people in it make of it.

Discrimination and Sexism at WorkThe Baglady claims she acts like a man to survive in the man’s world of technology. I do not quite like the phrase “acts like a man”, though – it’s demeaning of women as well as of men, especially men who do not conform to socially-approved stereotypes.

There’s more on workforce discrimination at This is What a Feminist Blogs Like. She points out that the reason articles based on this keep appearing is that discrimination against women, and especially mothers, is far from disappearing. In relation to India, I personally feel we should make discriminatory interview questions illegal, as they are in the US and other countries. I have got asked questions on my married state and when I plan to start a family (!). I have also heard that one HR manager (at a company that ultimately hired me) mentioned (to the person who later became my boss) that it’s not a good idea to hire single women, as they get married and move away. So you don’t hire single women because they’re likely to get married, and you don’t hire married women because they’re likely to get pregnant.

BetaCandy at the Hathor Legacy reveals that film schools teach screenwriters to fail the Bechdel test, revealing the immense sexism of Hollywood. BetaCandy found herself unable to adhere to this rule and ultimately “left film for good”.

Double Standards around Teen PregnancyKate Smurthwaite points out that in all the focus on teen girls getting pregnant, there has been very little attention on the fact that two people participate to cause a pregnancy. And no one seems to have asked the obvious question, were these under-16 girls raped or did they have consensual sex with minor boyfriends?

Feminist Avatar holds the optimistic view that we will not retract to a more misogynist or sexist age, because feminism is good for men too. Indeed, sexism and gender stereotyping hurts men as well, as they are expected to behave in certain ways.

On Rape and Sexual ViolenceHarpyMarx writes about the double standards and minimisation of rape. She notes, “It is still an uphill struggle for women to report rape and sexual assaults. There are numerous obstacles from the idea of ‘grey rape’ where a woman is in a situation where she never intended to have sex but wound-up being forced into it, ‘because until that point, they’d been a willing participant’ to ‘sexual familiarity’, where the woman knows the attacker, is treated with more leniency and is used in mitigation.”

Reema takes on Indians’ obsession with fair skin (especially for women) and how marketers play on it through sexist ads. The sexist ads long aired for Unilever’s Fair & Lovely often irked me considerably, yet what disappoints me more is that Fair & Lovely is an extremely successful product and has spawned many imitations over the years. A warning: the comments space has a couple of nasty comments about Halle Berry’s Oscar acceptance speech, hinting that black people are racist because they bring up the issue of race. I absolutely disagree, and I suspect this view stems from ignorance of the struggles that different races have faced against discrimination in different parts of the world. An analogy for India might be caste or religion, with upper castes discriminating against Dalits and other lower castes and people of one religion looking down on those of another.On the (Lack of) Efficacy of Single-Sex SchoolsTamara Schulman at Womenstake writes about single-sex classrooms and “the critical question of whether these programs provide an important educational option for students or are based on and replicate outmoded stereotypes”.

And that concludes the carnival. I hope you enjoyed it! If you are interested in hosting the next one, write to nataliebenATgmailDOTcom.

12 comments:

Have been silently lurking at your blog for some time. Super compilation, this looks like! Look forward to reading. Thank you for including my piece. (The Carnival has however been hosted by 2 other Indian bloggers -myself and the tamilpunkster)

Thanks, all. Sorry for being late with comment moderation: it's been a long day at work.

Apu: I didn't know you'd hosted the carnival earlier. I had seen the one hosted by the tamil punkster's, but I believe she's in the US, so - you'll notice - I said it's the first time to my knowledge that the carnival's being hosted from India. I've been reading your blog too lately, and enjoying it.